The Road of Bones

SiberiaRussia

30 May

A strip of road that can be considered on of the most isolated in the world.

It’s tough, at times it isn’t even a road, and almost all of it can be considered a mass grave.

The Road

The Road of Bones is a road made entirely of gravel and mud, and throughout the Russian winter, which is most of the year, is pretty much ice. Stretching for over 2000 km, the road takes you from the city of Magadan, on the Pacific Ocean, all the way inland to Yakutsk, an inland city that can be found in Eastern Siberia. And the stories are true, Siberia is remote and sparsely populated. So much so that the Kolyma Highway, as the Road of Bones will be marked on maps, is the only road in the area, providing the only way in or out.

Originally a prisoner built road, if you’re inclined to travel along the road, every now and then you’ll see traces of labour camps that are fast disappearing with the ravages of time. And when I say every now and then, I mean every now and then, everything is so spread out, that people have been known to die on the road when car trouble has struck.

Now the R504, the Kolyma Highway, is an upgraded version of the prisoner-built road when the Soviet Union was in power.

Atka is a town that you’ll find about 200 km out from Magadan. The town came about in the early 1930s, because of the Gulags in the area, and was widely populated with geologists, engineers and some prisoners, not to mention the Far North Construction Trust, which was a branch of the Soviet Secret Police ensuring the continued construction of the Kolyma Highway.

Magadan was another town built as the result of the gulags appearing. Founded in 1930, it was a town with a population of 90 000, and functioned as a major transit centre for those prisoners on their way through to the labour camps. By 1990, Magadan seemed to be moving from strength to strength, with a population of about half a million. But unfortunately for Magadan, the USSR’s time had come to an end, and with the local economy diminishing, the town residents too started to move away.

The Kolyma Highway’s main function was to move prisoners from Magadan through the Far Eastern section of Russia and to the camps that were Stalin’s Gulags. The shells of small towns still exist where the Gulags were located, dotted along a landscape that with any other history wouldn’t be associated with any other words except, ‘breath-taking’ and ‘gorgeous’.

Unfortunately, the history of the area is not one looked back upon with a smile. The prisoners forced to build the road had to do so through all seasons. That meant wading their way through insect-infested swamps in summer and balancing on ice fields in winter. And as the road started to take shape it only brought with it more and more prisoners, some to work in the mines, and others to work on the endless road. And there weren’t big road making machines like we have today, every bit of that road was made using hand tools, mainly shovels.

And if you think that it was back-breaking work you would be right. Hundreds of thousands of people classed as prisoners under the Soviet Union died as a result of working on that road. It’s even been said that one person died for very metre of road that was built.

And those who perished in their work weren’t even given the decency of a proper burial, the sentries supervising the work didn’t even bother to move the bodies off the road. The bodies were left within the foundations of road, where the prisoners unlucky enough to still be alive were forced to use the meat as mortar and the bones as substitutes for stones. Which means that anyone who travels along the Kolyma Highway is in fact travelling over one of the largest mass graves in history, with a reported 125 000 people dying as a result of working on the road. Giving it its name of the ‘Road of Bones’.

The Gulags

Once it was discovered that the whole Eastern region of the country was rich with natural resources, the Soviet Union decided that there was no better way to access and harness those resources than creating the largest network of labour camps ever seen. And those resources they were after? They included gold, uranium, tin, silver and even wood.

In total, 80 concentration camps were built throughout the Kolyma Region. And getting there for the prisoners wasn’t easy. First you would be arrested, then you would travel on the Trans-Siberian railway until you reached Vladivostok, then usually a week spent in ship cargo holds would see you end up at Magadan, where you would then travel, along the Kolyma Highway to your designated Gulag camp.

But what of the first prisoners? There wasn’t a road to travel on for the first of them, and who better to build the infrastructure of future prisoners than the current ones? And so the prisoners in the Gulags were set to work, where they would build over 3000 km of road in all, and would spend 20 years, 1932 to 1952, doing it.

Over the lifespan of the Gulags, over a million prisoners were sent by the road to the camps. And these weren’t necessarily just people who had been caught participating in illegal activities, some were convicted of political crimes, and when Stalin was around, this literally could have been as slight as breathing in the wrong direction.

And those condemning people as political prisoners, did not discriminate. Some of Russia’s finest minds ended up in the Gulags as a result of Stalin’s Great Terror. Take Sergei Korolev for example, a rocket scientist who, after surviving the Gulag, then went on to send the first man into space in 1961. Or the poet, Varlam Shalamov, who spent 15 years in the Gulag. Once he was released he wrote down his experiences in his book Kolyma Tales, where he tells of the horrors of the gulag and forced labour. Here’s a very short snippet:

There are dogs and bears that behave more intelligently and morally than human beings.

So it really doesn’t take much imagination to understand how brutal working on the Kolyma Highway or in the Siberian mines would have been for these poor people. And if you wish to read of Shalamov’s experiences for yourself, you can find a copy of his book on the podcast’s Bookshop.org page. Check out the shownotes for a link.

So forced labour camps first started springing up around 1918, when Lenin was in charge. These camps sole use was to isolate and probably eliminate those that the Soviet regime deemed as its enemies. So again, anyone breathing in the wrong direction.

From around 1923, the Solovetsky Special Designation Camp came about in an effort to test the best ways to hold ridiculously large amounts of prisoners and force them into labour. This model would eventually turn into what we know today as the Gulag, where forced labour was pretty much its sole purpose.

As Stalin instilled his Great Terror, more than 1.5 million people were arrested throughout 1937 and 1938. About 700 000 people were immediately shot, leaving over 800 000 for the camps.

As we already know these camps were as isolated as they come, setting up shop in some of the hardest to get to places of the USSR. But it was at these camps where over 2 million people perished from starvation, illness or just because a guard didn’t think they were working hard enough.

And it wasn’t just adults either, children who had been brought to the camps when their mothers were arrested, or were unfortunate enough to be born in a camp, were put into ‘infant orphanages’, even if both their parents were still alive. And I imagine that these places were not fun places to be either.

And those people who ended up in the camps, who were they? Well they weren’t solely Russians who didn’t know the correct direction to breathe in. A lot of them were migrants, forced into Soviet labour camps because Stalin didn’t like their country. After the USSR invaded Eastern Poland in September 1939, a lot of those Polish residents were deported to the labour camps, and the same went for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia during the Soviet occupation.

It wasn’t until 1953, once Stalin had died and the Great Terror of repression had finally come to an end, that the Gulags were closed. You won’t find much evidence of them left though, because the camps were actively dismantled. And all those prisoners, the ones who had endured and survived, had to figure out a way of returning to their homes, if they still existed at all.

And that town we spoke about earlier, Atka, well even though it never had a major labour camp associated with it, it still only existed because of the gulags. The town served as a hub for transport and refuelling of the trucks carrying the prisoners and the results of the miners along the Kolyma Highway.

But once the camps closed, Atka didn’t fade away like so many of the other towns. It actually kept growing as the prisoners were replaced with those willing to work the mines for the high salaries that were being offered.

Travelling on the Road

These terrors that occurred along the Kolyma Highway are fast disappearing, and with it the collective memory of the atrocities committed in the name of Stalin. As Rostislav Kuntsevich, a historian of the Magadan regional museum that has an exhibition of the camps, notes:

Nature is doing its work, and soon nothing will be left.

But sometimes, nature’s work brings the deeds of the past back into the forefront of our minds. As when the snow melts and part of the road falls away, or if the land is disturbed due to the mines, the evidence of the past can come right through to the surface. The deputy governor in the area, Andrey Kolyadin only has to say a few words to understand the horrors of the past:

Everything here is built on bones.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for all Russians, even some of those who used to be prisoners of the Gulag have learnt to forgive and forget. Even though the saying is that ‘time heals all wounds’, one would have thought that a Gulag wound would have been too deep to heal, but Antonia Novosad, who’s now 93, and a former prisoner herself doesn’t think so.

Stalin was God. How to say it? Stalin wasn’t at fault at all. It was the party and all those people. Stalin just signed.

This almost flies in the face of what we would think to be unforgivable. Antonia was sent to a Kolyma Gulag where she was forced to work in a tin mine. At the time she was just a teenager, and spent 10 years as a political prisoner after false charges were put against her. The fact that she doesn’t hold anything against Stalin is frankly, astonishing. She even remembers some prisoners crying when they were told that Stalin had died. I’m not sure if this is some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or if it’s just the result of a brilliant propaganda campaign.

But Antonia isn’t the only one who is willing to forget Stalin’s worst moments. Vladimir Naiman, a geologist in the area, turned keeper of grave crosses, reckons that:

Stalin was a great man.

He’s referring to his role in defeating the Nazi’s and his ability to introduce industrial power to Russia. And this is from a man who in the 1970s, fell into a soggy patch of ground that was full of coffins and bones, where he himself would erect eight crosses to honour their sacrifice.

Even though the physical reminders of the time of the Gulag are fast fading and those with memories are willing to forget, it’s odd that someone wanting to keep the history alive is Putin, the current Russian President. With some government-funding a Gulag History Museum opened in Moscow in 2018. And yet despite this very physical reminder of Stalin’s repression, it frequently doesn’t even get into the top ten when put against the celebrations for Stalin’s triumphs, like that of the Second World War.

Because of this continued praising of Stalin, his popularity is the highest it has been in decades, with a survey conducted in March 2020 showing that about 76 percent of Russians see the Soviet Union as a good idea, and Stalin as the most liked Soviet leader.

And when a Moscow blogger, Yuri Dud, found out, through another survey, that almost half of the young population of Russia didn’t even know about the Great Terror, he decided to travel the entire length of the ‘Road of Bones’. The resulting documentary, ‘The Home of Our Fear’ can be found on YouTube, I’ve put a link for it in the show notes, if it catches your fancy.

And, as it often does, for some seeing the physical proof of the truth only has them doubling down. With Kuntsevich saying:

It is best not to argue with people about Stalin. Nothing will change their minds.

There is a commemoration to those who suffered in the Gulags though. Sitting on the site of one of the transit camps in Magadan, is a concrete statue called ‘The Mask of Sorrow’. It was built in the 1990s by then President Boris N. Yeltsin and is a reminder of a horrible time in history.

Today, the few settlements that are left are few and far between and are still getting smaller. With many leaving because of the harshness of the climate. A town called Oymyakon, that can be found on a side road off the Kolyma Highway, is believed to be the oldest place on earth where people actively choose to live. An average day would expect to see a temperate as low as -50° Celsius, and has at one time even recorded the lowest temperature north of Antarctica.

But it’s not just Oymyakon that can get bitterly cold. The whole length of the Kolyma Highway can be so dangerous in winter that the risk of freezing to death is just a dead battery or a flat tire away. The risk of dying along the Kolyma Highway is so high that it’s now actually illegal to pass a stranded car without checking it out and asking if they need help.

And if you do get stranded but luck is on your side, you might actually find a shipping container with a heater and radio, so that you can call for help and stay warm while you wait. But these are only found in the most remote of places along the highway, so definitely don’t rely on them.

While winter may seem a rough time to travel along the highway, it’s actually the safest time of year. When spring rolls around and all that snow and ice melt, all you get is a road full of slippery mud, fallen trees, and rivers that used to have an ice bridge, now taking part of the road with it. And that’s not even talking about the wildlife.

When Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode along the Kolyma Highway in 2004 in their series Long Way Round, they found the road to be in a pretty shocking state. Since then it’s actually become quite a popular place to ride for many motorbike enthusiasts, and because of the increased traffic, the highway was upgraded in 2008 to include all weather gravel, and even given the status of a Federal Highway. Which I imagine allows more funding for upkeep.

If you find yourself travelling along the Road of Bones, take a moment or two to think of the hundreds of thousands that will forever rest underneath it.

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